ARM announces Ares

Foo_ (foo.delete@this.nomail.com) on February 23, 2019 1:38 am wrote:
> Ennis (quinn_noel.delete@this.yahoo.com.au) on February 23, 2019 1:18 am wrote:
> > The mighty Intel juggernaut has run aground after 30 years
> > of dominance, and people whose whole career has been
> > spent in that environment have failed to notice the change
> > because they are submerged in the detail. Spectre
> > is not just an inconvenience that can be patched. It brings in the end of speculative processing, for good.
> > Fortunately RISC marched on quietly on the margins so there is a working alternative.
>
> Because ARM CPU performance magically doesn't rely on speculative processing?
>
> In case you're lazy, here's a hint straight from the article: "Arm here also employs some
> of the biggest branch target and direction prediction buffers that are publicly known in
> the industry"... Those branch prediction buffers wouldn't be very useful if they weren't
> used to speculate taken / not taken branches, and their respective targets.
>
> And guess what: "Spectre is a vulnerability that affects modern microprocessors
> that perform branch prediction" (from Wikipedia).
>

ARM CPUs including implementations from ARM and Apple have been affected by meltdown and a bunch of spectre variants.

I have seen no evidence that any high performance CPU designers anywhere had anticipated this and proactively worked to avoid it in their designs until the spectre/meltdown discovery.